Re: [Evolution] Migrating from Thunderbird via import without duplicates

[Patrick O'Callaghan <poc usb ve>]

On Wed, 2020-11-04 at 21:01 +0900, christopher via evolution-list
wrote:
> POC,
>
> Maybe I have just missed this the whole time using gmail, but in the 
> event in Evolution you did a Select All + Del. How would you recover? I 
> know Gmail keeps things in the trash for 30 days, so I guess this 
> what-if scenario would be easily noticed in this time period, but what 
> if you did something unknowingly and didn't notice until a few months 
> later?

Then I'd lose all my mail. I don't care. The probability of this
actually happening without me noticing it is a lot smaller than that of
my PC going up in flames or my backup disk suffering bitrot. I do keep
nightlybackups of my home directory of course, on an attached mirrored
disk. (I'm not a lunatic.) However I'm quite happy for Gmail to take
care of that side of things. That's a decision each of us has to make
for themselves.

> One situation I couldn't recover from in Gmail recently without a backup 
> was the read/unread status of emails. I somehow messed up a sorting 
> filter in Thunderbird and marked everything as read mistakenly. I 
> organize what I need to still read by this attribute, so I would surely 
> forget to respond to several mails had I not had a recovery solution in 
> place. In this case I simply turned off the internet to my smartphone 
> and manually went in and marked them all unread again... A pain in the 
> ass. I tried restoring from my local backups, but it seems either gmail 
> was overriding my local changes on sync, or this information was simply 
> not stored in the mbox backups I had. Either way, I realized how flawed 
> my backup plan was after this, and thus the start of this thread.

AFAIK Gmail pays no attention to your local copy. Evolution on the
other hand, does pay attention if you set it up that way, such as with
synced IMAP. And you can easily incorporate its local data in your
regular backup schedule.

> I'm sure gmail has plenty of copies of your data, but do they actual 
> have backups (i.e. incremental, history reversible?) Without that, if 
> you make one mistake ALL the copies get mirrored and you're out of luck.

Not for mail, to my knowledge (though they do keep generational copies
of files in Google Docs etc.). I don't care (see above).

poc